Beyond HTML and CSS
10 Oct 2024
Introduction to Bootstrap
From my perspective, UI frameworks seemed super intimidating for me because there were so many new things that I needed to learn in order to utilize it in my code. I thought that maybe I would be better off with just pure HTML and CSS because I was having a lot of trouble putting a website’s design together without needing to ask ChatGPT for help on figuring out how to put a certain feature together. Was I right? Not at all. UI Frameworks, I learned, make the investment of time and effort worth it, no matter how frustrating it can be.
Beauty of Frameworks
lthough you do need to learn or research for it, UI frameworks have a bunch of shortcuts to different designs. Frameworks, like Bootstrap specifically, have different elements that can be used in your code with little work, like navbars. Once I was able to figure out how to implement it, I immediately realized just how easy it is to get different parts of a webpage into projects quickly. Creating a navbar with raw HTML and CSS instead would take a lot more work because you would need to be aware of how to fine-tune the sizes and alignment, and what the layout would look like on different screen sizes. Bootstrap makes this significantly easier because of its classes and systems that makes creating a navbar with a fewer amount of code possible.
Bootstrap also seems super helpful when in a software engineering environment because of its standardized components, which makes everything fit together visually. This is something useful for people working in a team on projects because it would be less likely that people would make mistakes relating to not matching up with everyone else’s standards. Again, also very convenient that the same CSS code doesn’t have to be written repetitively.
I think that while recreating the Baggu site for a recent assignment, utilizing Bootstrap made it a lot easier to recreate an almost identical clone to the site. Of course, not everything worked the same and it was mostly static minus the implementation of a side menu bar, but aesthetically, it was there! I would have been pulling my hair out if I only decided to use raw HTML and CSS, and I’m very thankful for UI frameworks because of this.